Ranasinghe Premadasa

Ranasinghe Premadasa (23 June 1924-1 May 1993) was President of Sri Lanka from 2 January 1989 to 1 May 1993, succeeding Junius Richard Jayewardene and preceding Dingiri Banda Wijetunga. In 1993 he was assassinated in a suicide bombing by the Tamil Tigers during the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Biography
Ranasinghe Premadasa was born on 23 June 1924 in Colombo, British Ceylon, United Kingdom (present-day Sri Lanka) to a family of Theravada Buddhist Sinhalese. He attended St. Joseph's College in Colombo and was elected Deputy Mayor of Colombo in 1955 for the Sri Lankan Labor Party, but in 1956 he joined the United National Party instead. Premadasa enacted programs to help the poor and give foster parents to orphans, and in 1989 he was elected as President of Sri Lanka due to the public's support for him. His forces crushed the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna communist rebellion, but in the Sri Lankan Civil War they faced a great threat in the Tamil Tigers, a secessionist group of Hindu Tamils that sought to establish a state in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. He was responsible for the withdrawal of the Indian Army, whose presence was so unpopular that Tamils in Tamil Nadu state assassinated President Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Premadasa was said to have supported the LTTE by ordering his men to surrender their arms, allowing for the LTTE to massacre 774 policemen with their own guns. On 1 May 1993 he was assassinated in a Tamil Tigers suicide bombing at a May Day rally in Colombo a week after United National Party politician Lalith Athulathmudali was shot dead.